Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose

alright the return of same moment how's it going nice to be back right how are things good this is good you know YC is gonna be huge next batch yeah interviewed like more than thousand companies I'm saying Open has going really well excited about that yeah I'm ready for this year to be winding down but it's been excellent so I wanted to do something a little bit different for this episode and just break apart a lot of your essays so I went back sounds fun we'll see all right I have a rough outline with a

few general topics that you seem to have written about a few times and I figure we can kind of just go into each one so it seems like there are several categories from observing your thoughts and then choosing what to work on and then creating actual value once you've chosen a thing and then pass that kind of purpose in general like purpose in your work the first one the first quote that I liked was from your essay the days are long but the decades are short and that quote was minimize your cognitive load from distracting

things that don't really matter it's hard to overstate how important this is and how bad most people are at it yeah I think it's very easy to spend a decade being incredibly busy and incredibly stressed every day and feeling like you're working incredibly hard and creating a ton of movement but not moving forward and I think this is like a big trap and it's so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant or it is so easy to get caught up in like the trifles of office politics and playing status and

power games that don't matter mm but feel so fun and so important or or just like random other like [ __ ] that piles up in life and I've at least found for myself I have like a like fixed budget of cognitive output per day and I can spend that on whatever but if I let it go on unimportant stuff then I never have time to get to the the really important stuff and it's so easy to get heads down and focused and sort of mislike what am i actually accomplishing yeah the number of people

who have said to me like man I thought for 10 years I was doing incredible work because I felt like I was creating a huge amount of output but in retrospect it was in the wrong direction um is always depressing you do need to focus and do stuff but you know I think it's like really good to like focus for some period of time and then step back and think like am I am i doing the right thing you also don't to make the mistake that sort of like the stereotypical Silicon Valley 22 year old

or 21 year old college dropout says of you know I'm gonna solve all the world's problems in three months and if I haven't done in three months I failed so I'm going to give up and do the next thing yes and then they like jump onto some other project that's bad too so balancing this is hard but I think like making check-in to make sure you're working on things that matter and working on an appropriate time scale mmm time horizon is really important yeah because I kind of wanted to address broadly how do you even

frame that you have a certain amount of like detachment that you need yeah so when you how do you step back when you need to UM how do I do that I am pretty good about like in my downtime I naturally just think about like do I feel like I am being maximally useful and working on the right things or are there like like you know should YC be doing something totally different than we are today yeah um like should we be willing to throw everything out and rethink about it or is it going well

do we need to scale but I think people find different ways to do that like one specific thing I do which is sort of become this annual ritual I really like is December 31st every year I take a break from vacation and I like sit and I write down what went well the last year what didn't I look at like hard that I might to-do list for the year and I write that one out for the next year and because I know I'm gonna do that every year yeah I stress about it less the other

364 days but but I I think like the fundamental pattern that has always worked for me is take time explore of things try a lot of things try to have like a beginner's mind about what will work and what won't work but trust your intuitions pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible and then be very honest with yourself about what's working well and what's not yeah and in the hard part is cut all the stuff that's not working and focus down and down until you're eventually focused on the one thing that's

really working are the two things that are really working in terms of choosing I mean this sort of transitions and to choosing what to work on and how to create value but in terms of establishing those metrics for you know so say you say you have like you know YC yeah opening eye and then the rest of your life yeah do you create similar metrics for each one or does each one oh it's definitely not it's like I am skeptical of these like systems where you try to have like everything on the same rubric yeah

I I mean the best thing I can say is I've like I follow my interests I try to pursue a lot of projects that seem interesting I realized that most of them will fail and I don't care and then the ones that as long as the ones that work really work yeah so like opening I really works YC really works I've done playing other things the last five years that have not worked at all we should explore that because I think it's something that's not talked about and it's to the detriment of everyone so for

example like last year year before you were doing a lot of political stuff yeah I still think that is gonna work I am that's not let me let me try to frame it in like fair an area where a lot of things went wrong at once but in a way that was really good okay so I sold my startup when I was like 26 something like that and I worked the acquiring company for a little while maybe 25 I remember and then I took a year off and in that year which is hard to do

it's really hard to do in Silicon Valley because like in a place where social status is determined by your job and what you're working on like when you show up at a party and someone says oh what are you working on and you're like I'm kind of just taking the year off like you can sort of see in real time their eyes like look for someone else in the room to talk to it doesn't feel that good but it's an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do this but if you are in the position

between jobs where you can take a year off I highly recommend that I think it was like one of the two or three best career things that I ever did in that year I I read like many dozens of text books I learned about fields that I had been interested in I didn't have any idea that they were all going to come together in the way they did but like I learned a lot about nuclear engineering hey I was starting to work so I learned a lot about AI oh and about synthetic biology I learned

about investing that was the year that I started being like well I had made like maybe four angel investments before this that I was like alright I'm gonna get serious about this and try it and see if I like it I traveled around a lot I kind of like really got a feel for much more of a feel for like what the rest of the world is like I met people that were working on all sorts of different things who were nice enough to talk to me I got badly needed time to reconnect with my

friends and family I just got caught up on life and I just sort of like helped people that seemed I had unlimited time right yeah so if I met someone interesting and it seemed good and needed help I would just help them and they would teach me stuff or they would like offer me the chance to invest in their startup later and I left myself unscheduled so I'd like the drop of the Hat I could like fly to another country for a conference yeah and I started doing all this random stuff and out of all

of it almost all of it didn't work out but the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later so but you okay so you both sound like it it was positive and it was great and you had a great time yeah but when you say it didn't work out how I mean like the individual projects like I invested a bunch of companies that failed okay I got really excited about a few companies I wanted to start that turned out to be bad ideas for different reasons yeah but that's like fine because that's

the thing when you're in explore mode you try a lot of projects and you accept that most won't work right okay so yeah I know a few people that have gone through this and it seems like they don't always so maybe they say alright I'm gonna go on vacation and that lasts a couple months yeah they let come back yeah I'm meeting with people or maybe they just immediate jump into something start researching yeah whatever's trendy which i think is like a separate problem where you're just following everyone else that's a mistake usually you it's

the constant the crowd is right sometimes and okay fine but then how do you become decisive because you say a year so this is the trend relatively short their trick is how do you figure out what to commit to and when yeah and this is where I think it takes brutal honesty with yourself about which projects are actually working and which you would like to convince yourself are working and I've been guilty of this mistake many times and I will many times in the future this is a very hard thing to train yourself to do

mm should really step back and dispassionately look and say like am i desperately trying against myself this is working or is this actually working but I think it is a muscle that is buildable what clearly people get good at that it's just hard because it means admitting failure in something like every time I make a major investment in a company um I am convinced it's going to work you don't go in expecting to lose your money or at least you know like I am prepared to pay for the expected value that I think it's going

to work mm-hmm and and once you've anchored that it's like hard to go back and man I was so wrong which obviously has all the times the best thing about investing in a lot of companies is you learn to be you you it's very humbling you learn to be majorly wrong very frequently and you learn that that's okay as long as the magnitude of the successes pays for all of the failures hmm I haven't thought about this before but say you sold your company and had some money and weren't thinking about being an angel investor

do you think it's actually a good idea to angel invested a little bit before you start something else even if you're not pulled in that direction um the things that I think have taught me a lot about like business are poker and angel investing so I recommend both of those fair enough by the way as a quick plug for poker so I played a lot in college like fairly seriously and it's not for everybody mm-hmm but I strongly recommend it as just a way to kind of like learn about the world in business in psychology

and risk and everything else mm-hmm did you play like like competitive up every 101 I went to school on the peninsula and so I would go down there a lot you know that's great did that fun your startup it did not for my startup but it funded my like living expenses as a college student Wow yeah yeah I'm always surprised by the person I mean there aren't infinite people who can do this but there are enough people that actually makes how I would have done it for free like I just loved it so much yeah

okay did you ever get into the online stuff like ten hands at once um I did I did that was not as fun and then it kind of stopped okay all right cool so you have all you wrote the productivity post fairly recently I thought that was really fun thank you your three main tips were sleep exercise and nutrition for like physical productivity yeah that's like a small fraction of the whole thing but yes I've been to the core right because if you don't have a foundation you're off the number look it is possible that

I am incredibly genetically unlucky and I just like these people who claim they only need to sleep four hours a night it's true I suspect it's not I suspect it's not but I like I try to sleep eight hours or close to it as much as I can and I get it most nights and if you're trying to like win on really big creative ideas much better off like cut something have less of them yeah whatever but like for me skimping on sleep which I have tried at other points in my life is a terrible

trade yeah I've tried to optimize what I kind of think of as like my best time you know like I try not to sell my best time for anything other than the projects I want to work on totally I think everyone it takes people a while but everyone figures out what that is yeah like for me it's early mornings or like the first three hours after I wake up and like man do I put a huge anything getting in the way of that right how many hours do you think you have good hours every day

it's always in flux but I mean like if you take a Armadale or something you get 20 yeah but I don't know if that's necessarily the best version of Sam Altman I would say I mean I can definitely like sit down and be like super productive for eight hours in the row no brick I mean go to the bathroom whatever yeah I know brick yeah which i think is more than most people can do but on me I mean I think and get before before I need to go work out or something but it's definitely

not like sixteen and I think like the people who say 16 I feel like I get much more done than they do so I just don't believe it maybe yeah until we evolve in someone can I get 16 done so in your in your broad riding on choosing what to work on I love the Hamming lecture I had a time ago and he's he's so much more prescriptive than most people are today which I really enjoy the tone of do you remember that story about the lunchroom I do yeah he you're right people don't talk

like that anymore not everyone not many or not many it's been very interesting trying to sort of help create a research institution here yeah and I do think we've done one of the more interesting research labs of the last couple of decades the world isn't set up to support this anymore and I and it's a very interesting question about why but I think if you take one one thing I've learned from open the eye is if you sit down and say like our research goal is to create a GI yeah that's very far off and

very hard yeah you work on anything you want that is gonna help us get there yeah it's people no one said that before like it's that's hard to do and how do you manage the psychology of multiple teams working on things that are all pointing toward AGI but in different directions you know like maybe it's we're about it yeah maybe it's gaming and then all of a sudden someone gets a result to that shift an entire team yeah I think it's really like I think it's actually a very similar algorithm to what we were talking

about for how do you have to do with your life yeah like try lots of things let people follow their intuitions and then when something starts working put a lot more resources behind it mm-hmm that's worked for us really well one other thing from the days are long but decades are short I I liked your risk explanation so specifically you say things in life are rarely as risky as they seem most people are too risk-averse and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths yeah I mean the risk is you look that they're

real what risk actually looks like is that you look back at the end of your career and you're like [ __ ] I wasted it totally and people aren't programmed to think about risk that way like we're very good at thinking about short-term catastrophic risk and we're very bad about thinking about long term chronic risk like we worry about you know nuclear plant meltdowns but not about yeah like inhaling coal smoke or whatever and so there's like a very small handful of people that I would say like I have taken an interest in their careers

because I think they're going to like do amazing things in the world and I try to spend a lot of time with for no reason other than I want to help them yeah and consistently like this is the thing i find myself pushing them on which is you're thinking about you're thinking too small you're think about risk the wrong way mm-hmm or you need a perspective shift man perspective shifted that's something I want to write about that at some point like the I think as you get older perspective in a shift in perspective just gets

harder and harder and harder and it's an unbelievably valuable thing to get I think this is why people end up taking like lots of lots of psychedelic drugs I don't know if that's the best approach but keeping the sort of mental flexibility to look at things from fresh perspectives and new angles man is that important to hold on to yep it doesn't happen very often man it's like losing someone close you losing losing things for the psychedelic path has become very popular and yeah just on reading the research happening and you know limited experience here

like oh so it's both abstracting you from your daily habits and then giving you the motivation to pursue things that you were kind of on the fence with yeah I mean I don't think you need drugs for any of that I think you just need to commit to do it and give yourself like a space in a format and people to do it with on the other like thing that I found for all of the stuff that really matters is surrounding yourself with people who will make you more ambitious sort of be more and making

more inquisitive shift your perspective more yeah um is really important and like basically all people almost like ninety-eight percent of people in the world will try to pull you back and say it seems a little bit too crazy a little bit too out there a little bit too ambitious yeah almost everyone wants you to be average because it fits their framework yeah it's just it's more comfortable totally it works it works yeah has any book you've ever read on risk helped you understand risk or is it just through experience playing poker is one good way

to do it and reading poker books was good like reading blog biographies of people who have done like really amazing things I think is helpful like I love reading about sort of like the great the big iron science and engineering projects of history like like I don't think I'd ever it's hard to imagine I would ever get tired of like reading books about the Apollo program okay so now that like the the next kind of theme in a lot of your writings about creating value and say someone's chosen whatever they might want to work yeah

in your productivity essay you say my system has three kill three key pillars make sure to get the important [ __ ] done don't waste time on stupid [ __ ] and make lots of lists I feel like you should have hedged it you never get to get away from the things you've written anyway actually I think it's good well I do fundamentally like I maybe would have phrased it differently but I do shall leave I think people overcomplicate it I think this that all like productivity pointing where you have these like systems and like

yeah you know like these multi variable charts and three-dimensional whatever's like those people never seem to be the people who like really move the world forward I will observe and I think any system as long as it keeps you disciplined and getting done what you say you're going to get done is fine and I think like the simple ones really work the one thing I would say is if you're going to try to like multitask a lot written lists are very helpful mm-hmm but beyond that I think like whatever you find that works for you

um is good and I think like focus and prioritization are the keys here hmm yeah I do I think that's true I think for the most part you know what to do and you know in your screwing around and not doing it one thing that I have found helps people is if they have like a like a lot of CEOs form these small groups of like accountability buddies hmm it happens very naturally during YC because you have your batch mates and you have like group office hours and then you lose it and people feel their

productivity sag and so they reformed the groups by themselves and that that seems to work yeah there was this guy Nick Crocker who wrote this post elephants I don't know fever snow this post but yeah it was him and three of his friends basically weekly emails and then quarterly check-ins it's very simple and easy to follow would recommend it so the the other thing you talk about in creating value talk about these like big projects and there's the this other essay you wrote called what happened to innovation and I think is this fear that many

people have like oh man all the cool [ __ ] already happened when in reality it is obviously happening but you're questioning like how can we incentivize I mean if this one thing works like if we do actually build a gyro and the AI that is more important than all the innovation some total and Humanities so far so clearly not as all the innovation happened totally it's an interesting question of why people feel that way one is it's cool to like seem sort of world weary one is people like to complain another is that it

is true that most of the innovation recently has been in software like in the internet now I do think the Internet is like a triumph of humanity and like that's where the frontier is that's where the best people want to go work and so I think it is a fair criticism to say like most recent big iron innovation has been on the Internet and that is a criticism but it's also a praise and like you know I think there's usually like a small handful of frontiers where the most talented people go because that's where you're

making the most progress mm-hmm and sure it's not physics right now but that's ok and I think it's like if you just look at the rate of change in humanity in the last decade it's crazy it's crazy now it is like the Internet will not solve all problems but I think it'd be a mistake to say we're not making progress right and what about funding mechanisms have you changed your I mean I think that post was pre open ai yeah I will have a lot more to share here hopefully in the first quarter of 2019

one of my big projects this year has been how you fund this stuff yeah and I think we're close to an answer on projects without without the same appeal as AGI yeah like well if it's not gonna create like a lot of value for the world at some point I still don't have an answer but rings that will create value for the world but on a long time frame in uncertain ways I think we'll have some new structures to share ok wait for that yeah there was a point that Hamming brought about in his lecture

that he said he who works with the door-open get all kinds of interruptions but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important yeah so this figuring out the balance of how much random flux you accept in your life for how much wasted time yeah is hard that at some point and it takes a long time to get here you know you get to like hire a couple of people who screen stuff for you and that's great but I didn't have that luxury for a long time and there's

basically two things to do one is you take a lot of random meetings and you accept that 90% of the time you will waste your time and be frustrated with yourself for wasting your time for that one meeting that makes it all worth it net yeah but the trade-off for that is you have to work so much because you got to do that in addition to your regular work yeah do you allocate a percentage for that I used to again I've got sort of good screen systems yeah but I used to be like I used

to spend I don't know like 1015 hours per week and like random stuff and most of the time it was just painful and sometimes it's so valuable I think if you cut it off entirely its disastrous like if you don't have any like flow of like people outside your network with new ideas or just a lot of talent that is under appreciated it's really bad that's like a key point to that lecture yeah where's like Nobel Prize winners only work on important problems and it removes them from them yeah yeah yeah so you can't cut

it off totally but if you're not willing to work really hard I think you do have to just cut it down a lot okay yeah this is related I remember it was a funny moment at the hackathon like last year when you were there there was some team who was like we're gonna do this and then we're gonna do that and then we're gonna work on rockets or like help work on the rockets and you said something that I thought was so great well you're like if you want to work on Rockets go work on

rockets yeah I don't believe in the deferred life plan yeah the like a common criticism of people in Silicon Valley who I think have great features in their past are people who say some version of the following sentence my life's work is to build rock so what I'm going to do is spend I'm gonna make one hundred million dollars in the next three days say four in the next four years trading cryptocurrency with Minecraft a hedge fund because I don't want to think about the money problem anymore and then I'm gonna build rockets and they

never do either I believe if these people would just pick one thing or the other you know I'm I I'm obsessed with money so I'm gonna go make a hundred million dollars however long that takes but with it long enough time rise and then it's reasonable or I'm just gonna build rockets right now I believe they would succeed it either but the problem one of the many problems with the deferred life plan is everyone can kind of tell that that's what you're on mmm-hmm and you're not that serious about you're not that committed to either

and it just never works I mean it must work sometimes but I've seen it fail a lot lot lot and I understand the temptation of it and I understand the degree to which people feel well they're never like I'm gonna make $1,000,000 and then work on rockets and just raise the capital right it's always like I got there people that tend to be obsessed with like making a lot a lot of money mmm and I understand the temptation to like figure out basic financial security of course like I needed that myself but like I think

one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley is you actually can raise money as an unknown 22 year old to go make a rocket company it's happened several times at YC yeah and so if that's what you want to do like just get on with it the company will pay you a salary like you'll be fine if you can raise money at all you'll be fine if you can't raise money like think about something else but it is I mean I could go in such a long rant that I will just bore people and

piss people off but I would say the deferred life plan empirically usually does not work right and you don't if what you want to work on is like an ambitious company and you are in Silicon Valley and you're competent you very likely config you're out a way to just work on that problem mm-hmm you know maybe it means you have to go be an employee at space accents that have been Elon Musk but like at least you're doing what you want but that's fine and it's also like listen dude if what you really want is

a hundred million dollars and you just let me hear so that exactly just like a call a spade a spade and make money and but be willing to like agree that that takes hold you accept that takes a long time and you can't just sort of say I'm gonna compress this into three or four years and that's why you don't have guarantee it doesn't warbly you don't have to hide behind wanting to make Rockets gonna make money yeah I think many people actually do want to make the Rockets but they also you have to like

pick one kind of if you have to like you can't say I'm gonna do this thing for the short period of time and then do what I really want to do or you'll never motivate people to like join you don't want you to win and work with you yeah yeah it's like people can sense authenticity people can sense people's motivation people can sense if you're doing something because like if you're doing something for the right reasons and I think like to succeed in anything it's important that people are rooting for you it's important people want

you to win investors that press your team whatever and I think that's one of another one of the many problems with the with the deferred life plan mm-hmm yeah people of seemingly like any intelligence level and almost like any EQ level have amazing [ __ ] detector yeah like everyone yeah they do and again like doing anything worthwhile takes a long time and it takes a lot of like emotional trauma like a lot of people telling you you're an idiot or wrong or whatever and if you're not willing to sign up for that you're not

gonna succeed and people can also kind of sense when you're like not willing to sign up for that like if you're doing the crypto fun just to make money not because you're a die-hard believer in crypto right people can kind of tell yeah but even if it comes with yeah it's not even that it's just like riding this wave even just like even making money because if you're doing the crypto fun to make money that is kind of aligned but if you're not really into the crypto part right but would ya just like something about

it is no I've dude I've had it with like side projects or I'm like you know maintaining code for months and months and then I realize like I don't know how much I care about this write it but then it's hard like it's hard to pull out at that point and you have to write this is gonna go nowhere right so one of the last things that I wanted to talk about is is purpose in work and careers in general and I think it's kind of related to eg I will see ya so you wrote

an essay the merge back and you said our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that the difference is between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing so this is a common topic right work purpose ubi even where do you think that's going in the in the AGI era if it happens look I think people find purpose and meaning in many different ways and it is the only

thing I care about is that people find it somewhere and if it's in raising a family if it's in you know running a eSports team I think that's like as valid as trying to build a GI the thing I hate is just people who are apathetic and proud of it but yeah like I think that the definition of there are like I think what seemed to be some human universals about ways that we get meaning in life like human relationships for almost everybody all right like the top of that list feeling like we're creating value

for others like feeling like other people think highly of us and respect us there are many ways to do those things and I think one thing that will happen with this sort of arrival of AGI is intelligence like I got lucky I got born in reasonably smart will be less and less of a benefit and you know like 60,000 years ago like running around intelligence wasn't that much of a benefit like physical strength endurance much more important 60,000 years from now human biological intelligence I don't think will be that much of a benefit again and

it's just it happens to be in a moment in society where it is really valuable yeah actually I find it in particular it's out here like intelligence is so highly rated that people seem oddly disconnected from their bodies so it's been cool seeing you like doing the whole workout plan now the same Altman gunshow I know how much you weigh now I think I gained 18 pounds of muscle mass this year that's crazy you know and vegetarian to do interested so you're you're heavy lifting right heavy listen you feel better I do I do much

better than doing like heavy cardio yeah well the thing with that like I've shifted over to lifting this year and I've found that so first of all you get way stronger way faster like heavy cardio does almost you have nothing it just makes you eat a lot more I was good at bike riding yeah but like now I actually see physical progress which is crazy I mean the sad thing about it is like so I like gained all this weight which makes it like harder to run and I'd haven't been running this year yeah so

like I don't even know if I could run a mile without stopping at this point so in some sense I'm in terrible shape but in other sense like I'm really strong but they are just they're so different yeah they're diametrically opposed there are people online they're like oh well if you get your squat up to 500 you can bike anything and it's like you don't understand power-to-weight right so are you gonna set a goal for your fitness for 2019 I will on December 31st okay I don't know question mark I already hit my lifting goals

for this year but I'll keep going to the end of the year anyway nice Congrats thank you guys harsh I think the last thing is like what are you reading right now the last thing I read it's really short I recommend it a lot it's called the way to love by Anthony de Mello I'll take you like an hour to read it was recommended to me by end of all right and it is a series of meditations on life and it is a superfast read and I just finished it and I really enjoyed it excellent

we'll check it out all right man thanks for coming thank you you